warm the blood in my veins
by electriques
Summary: A child at 12 or a woman at 16; it has never mattered. She will always be Ginny Weasley, with a magpie where her heart should've been. Grabbing, stealing, coveting. TR/GW, years later.


repost from tumblr. title is inspired by/lifted from paper route's song, gutter.

* * *

She shuts her eyes closed and inside, it is a chorus of _mineminemine_.

A hiss, softer still than the basilisk's, pierces her heart.

 _Grab you, steal you, covet you - you are mine, Ginny Weasley, mine._

A curious, tender child had she been, small, milky white fingers tracing over the wine-dark cover of a diary, the cage of a demon. Wild and messy her scrawl had been, untamed and coltish, declarations of love and hatred spilling out of her soul so quickly she'd no idea that they too were disappearing at the edges of the pages he lived in between.

It had always been so with him (she hadn't realized it until it was too late - the sound of laughter in her ears the stench of death on her robes blood on her fingers). The claustrophobic intimacy they had maintained was real, but it masked _a take and a take and a take._ Taking her magic, taking her memories, taking the light from her eyes, the air from her lungs.

A theft so profound it left her struggling for breath at the edge of Slytherin's chamber.

In her last fading moments of clarity, she remembers - 

( _"A kiss for each gift, little Ginny."_

For each student she had petrified in his name, in his image, in his memory.

As she gazed up at him weakly through her pale, trembling lashes, a faraway thought registered dully in the recesses of her mind. _There had been four._

His eyes, a permafrost blue, had glinted wickedly in the dim firelight.

Their voices, though neither of them spoke, chanted in unison at the back of her skull.

 _One._ He pressed warm lips to her cold forehead.

 _Two_. He raised her left hand, brushed her palm with his lips. His touch was scorching now, _alive_ , as she froze and wilted beneath him.

 _Three_. He raised the right, kissed the inside of her wrist, his lips upon her weakening pulse. Fire to ice.

A pause.

His gaze lingered upon her almost curiously, and then he leaned down. Down, down, down, until he was close enough that she could feel his cool breath on her cheeks, unsettling strands of her hair. With a touch that could be mistaken for tenderness, he smoothed the rest of the hair away from her face. She, weak and feeble, still felt the skin underneath his touch nearly _shiver_ with anticipation. He leaned down and–

And then there was a sound, a familiar voice from a lifetime ago. _Harry?_ Her diary-boy had jerked his head up, a brief moment now scattered to the winds. She heard him rise, heard his footfalls, heard him _leave_ her, and she thrashed out weakly as a deep sleep began to claim her. _No no no,_ come back, come back, _come back_ )

And suddenly, she was awake, wrenched back into the realm of the living. At first it didn't seem so different - there had been blood everywhere and a dark eyed boy beckoning for her to follow. Yet there was all the difference in the world. There was a sword in his hand and no diary in hers.

"It's over. He's gone."

* * *

Orpheus had led Eurydice from her watery tomb with great pomp and fanfare - yet his child-bride had kept a terrible secret from him. Indeed, Hades lay below, dead and destroyed, his ashes spread far and wide. His last farewell, ungiven.

Yet it was his mantra that still rung in her ears, his loving whisper - _you are mine, Ginny Weasley, mine._

It was a lie. It was _never_ over. He was never truly gone.

* * *

A child at 12 or a woman at 16; it never mattered. She is still Ginny Weasley, with a magpie where her heart should've been. Grabbing, stealing, coveting.

She has grown, yes - tears do not come so readily to her eyes, a fierce fire has bloomed in her belly. She has become a hungry, beautiful creature, rising from the shadows that claimed her in her youth.

Yet the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now, Orpheus is nowhere to be found and Eurydice sheds no tears. _(She was not tearful. That was one of the many wonderful things about Ginny, you see. She was rarely weepy. Not since–)_

 _He_ lives at the edges of her psyche now - _now_ , it is a _give, give, give_. Unbidden, she presses into his open palm all her love and hate, her deepest sorrows and unbridled joys. Feeding her little magpie lover.

She does it because she knows _exactly_ how much to give, she knows what it is she is giving. He is completing himself with pieces of her, just as she has grown into herself and him, _always him._

Fed, he flickers in and out of corporeality, because try as he might _(she might)_ \- it is not enough to pull his soul completely out of the ether.

But sometimes, shrouded in the secrecy of night, he appears at the edge of _her_ bedchamber. In these brief, brilliant instants, he is real.

In these instants, Ginny grasps fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him to her with no hesitation, and breathes an all too familiar promise into his hungry mouth, against his wicked tongue, before claiming what she is owed: the fourth he never gave, that he so _willingly_ relinquishes. 

" _You_ are mine, Tom Riddle. Mine."


End file.
